NCAER, India’s oldest and premier economic think tank, hosts its prestigious annual brainstorming session, the India Policy Forum, every summer at its premises in New Delhi.

Since its inception in 2004, the IPF has been a platform carrying forward NCAER’s mandate of ensuring quality, relevance, and impact. It has enabled honest conversations among world-class researchers using evidence-based research and has emerged over the years as a leader of ideas and a unique forum for driving policy.

In the past two decades, the Forum has engaged in policy conversations that have contributed to a profound transformation of the research landscape on Indian economy and society. 

While discussing the evolution of the IPF over the last 20 years, the former Director General of NCAER and current Vice Chairman of NITI Aayog, Mr Suman Bery, who had launched the IPF Conference in 2003, said,

The IPF has been instrumental in facilitating a constructive interface between policymakers, on one hand, and academia and the research fraternity, on the other hand, to bring critical issues impacting the Indian economy to the notice of policymakers.

IPF is attended by a galaxy of eminent policymakers, economists, academics and researchers, who deliberate on research papers that cover a range of diverse sectors and subjects.

Contextualising the 20^th IPF, the NCAER Director General, Dr Poonam Gupta stated, “The IPF has, over the years, mirrored the momentous developments in India’s economic landscape while also flagging key socio-economic issues of concern for the country. The numerous issues that have found a voice at the IPF, and thereby in the papers featured in the IPF journal, include macroeconomic finance and fiscal policy; GDP growth and development; political economy; human development parameters including health, nutrition, education, and social welfare; poverty and inequality; domestic and international trade; microfinance and banking; gender equality and empowerment; and environment and climate change, to name just some of them. And some of the key issues from this category have found their way into the 20^th IPF as well.”